Saturday, March 24, 2012

Perspective on Reality

Much like my disposition to with hold from purchasing new video games until the hype surrounding them has diminished and the true reviews begin to surface, i am extremely skeptical about new campaigns that surface every so often. The most recent and most controversial of them all is the Kony 2012 campaign.

There's been a lot of negativity and sheep herding going on when it comes to this specific campaign, but not a whole lot of unbiased retrospect in my humble opinion. Within 12 hours of the time the video was released to the public, a group of people was already hunting for proverbial closet full of skeletons for IC. What they found was a long list of minor flaws that they twisted and mutilated to suit their own agenda, which was to discourage people from donate to the cause of invisible children.

Without pulling out financial records for the company and trying to take sides, i would like to underline a few of the arguments from both sides and see if i can't throw my two cents into the bar brawl that Kony 2012 has turned into.

The biggest argument i would like to bring up was one that i had seen on multiple youtube videos, forums and blogs just like mine which stated that only 31% of the company's earnings were being passed along to Uganda. Even though that's well over 2.5 million dollars, people are throwing massive fits saying that these guys aren't a proper NPO because they're not sending every cent over to uganda.

The three key things for an NPO to function is to have a base of operations, have a means of spreading their word, and have people to spread that word with those means. People have cried out stating that the two founders of the IC are making $90,000/year salaries. If we were to put this up in comparison to say, the CEO and COO of any for profit corporation in the world, that's really actually quite minescule. Combine that with the fact that average salaries for the four major California cities are all over $40,000 a year, which includes San Diego where their base of operations is located, that seems like a relatively modest pay for the CEO and COO of a global initiative.

Moving forward from that i do not believe that the plan to take down Kony in 2012 is either effective or smart. They even state in their videos that Kony has been aware of the US Military's attempt to catch him and has changed his tactics accordingly. However their suggestion is to train the corrupt Ugandan military with our soldiers to hunt Kony down themselves.

I would like to deviate for the present and go into a little side topic which remains valid to my point. Say you print out a document off your computer. That print out looks pristine, just the way you wanted it to look. Now let's go to kinko's and make a copy of that document. you might not notice it at first but there is a very small loss of quality in the copy. If you were to make another copy of that copy, there would be twice as much loss of quality. The loss of quality would continue exponentially everytime you made a copy of the latest generation's copy. The same applies to the Ugandan army.

You can have our soldiers train the Ugandan army in our tactics but they will never be as good as our troops back home, trained by people who have trained for years and know what they're doing without a doubt. Ground Zero so to speak. So this begs the question of "If we can't find Kony, how in gods name is the Ugandan army going to find them?" Aside from all of this there have been several professionals who have stated that Military action is not the correct course of action for this situation, and might only cause more backlash.

Of course i'm saying that Kony needs to be stopped, he is one of the most corrupt individuals in the world right now. But he's been doing this for 20+ years, he's got roots that go deeper than we could imagine. Besides that, killing kony or even so much as ex-filtrating him from Africa for trial would do no good. His brainwashed second in command would take his place and the terror and onslaught of Africa would continue as if nothing ever happened.

So, make an example out of Kony? Yes. Do it through military action? Maybe, but certainly not the way the Kony 2012 campaign proposes. If we're going to take military action it's going to require highly trained special forces to go in clandestine and wipe out Kony's top 5 officials then exfil him and release the children. Unfortunately though, some of these children may already be too far gone. Too brainwashed into loyalty to Kony to be safe to release. This is without a doubt, one of the most incredibly touchy subjects of the year. What are your thoughts?

5 comments:

  1. this kony stuff is total crap. he's been gone forever and the guys are paying themselves 70% of the money

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  2. Very deep. I definitely dislike how everyone's bandwagoning on Kony. Also, followed. Can't wait to see what else you'll post.

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  3. Speaking of the bandwagoners i've actually came across people in r/l who think they know everything about this kony campaign without researching it because they watched the video on facebook lmao

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    1. I have a great deal of pity for those people haha. I've never had the misfortune to meet one of them but i shudder to imagine.

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  4. The KONY campaign is nothing but a feel good movement for the iProduct generation. Where were they when Rwanda happened....oh that's right shopping at the GAP.

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